HeartBeat.bio, a biotech company building a highly scalable human organoid and AI-supported drug discovery platform for heart disease, announced the closing of a €4.5 million pre-Series A round co-led by i&i Biotech Fund, Invest AG, aws Gründungsfonds II, and Tensor Ventures.
The financing enables the completion of a ready-to-use, fully integrated, automated, high-throughput Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform for proprietary and collaborative drug discovery programs in indications with a high medical need such as drug-induced and genetic cardiomyopathies as well as myocardial infarction and fibrosis.
While cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, the development of effective therapeutic options is still limited due to high failure rate in clinical drug development and the lack of representative models that can adequately predict the physiology of the human heart.
Founded in 2021, HeartBeat.bio’s Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform facilitates the transition from traditional pre-clinical development to an animal-free, human-centric drug discovery approach. This new Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform approach starts from target identification and validation, disease modeling, hit identification and confirmation up to lead compound development, drug profiling and finally clinical trials-in-a-dish.
Developed in partnership with Molecular Devices, HeartBeat.bio combines their highly scalable Cardioid technology with Molecular Devices’ CellXpress.ai Automated Cell Culture System, a 3D biology innovation hub. Along with high-content-imaging and AI-based software, the Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform is designed to develop first-in-class drugs faster, less expensively and with a higher clinical success rate.
Michael Krebs, CEO of HeartBeat.bio, said: “This financing round is an important validation of our Cardioid technology and will help to unlock the platform’s potential to disrupt the cardiac drug development paradigm. We are proud to have received funding from four complementary investors with the financial capacity to continue funding in our Series A venture round, which is planned for 2025.”
“We believe HeartBeat.bio’s technology has real potential to contribute to more effective drug development to treat cardiovascular diseases. At the same time, we also see an ethical dimension, as the deployment of this technology will lead to a reduction in the number of animal experiments,” commented Tomas Maršálek, CFO of i&i Biotech Fund.
“HeartBeat.bio’s leading proprietary Cardioid technology and revolutionary platform to scale the cultivation of cardiac organoids have huge potential to change the future of cardiovascular drug development,” said Philipp Schupfer, Board Member of Invest AG, and continued: “As the leading Private Equity Fund in Austria, we are very pleased to support such an innovative Austrian biotech startup which is quite exceptional in this segment. We are very keen to support HeartBeat.bio and its strong team in the future and we are already excited about the coming years.”
Including this investment, HeartBeat.bio has secured a total of €10 million in private and public funds since company formation in 2021.
